Nurse the Hate: Spider Gang Confusion

 

I am ready to admit that I do not understand what "kids" think is cool.  I am completely aged out of it now.  I felt like I had a tenuous grasp on it, even a few years back.  This was probably an illusion.  I would see bands play the Beachland with extremely young crowds, mostly 15-20 year olds, and be able to quickly assess the appeal.  For example, I saw a band that was "electronic David Bowie with an emphasis on ironic 80s keyboard sounds".  Got it.  I saw "new version of California late 80s hardcore band" a bunch of times.  There are plenty of "angry metal with cookie monster vocals".  I get all those.  It is a reinterpretation of something that has come before.  Shit, that's all the Cowslingers and Whiskey Daredevils are if we are being honest.  However, last night I saw something I really struggled to understand.

In the Ballroom was something called "Spider Gang".  I am so out of it that even the listing doesn't make sense to me.  "Spider Gang is a rap collective started by Lil Darkie in the genre of hyper punk featuring BRUHMANEGOD, MKULTRA, Wendigo, FL. VCO, JOHNNASCUS, and BLCKK."  I don't know what hyper punk is.  I don't know Lil Darkie, and I suspect I would lose my job and be imprisoned if I said his name out loud in a workplace environment.  "Did you hear what that man said?  Stone him!  Stone him!!!"  I start screaming "But it's his name!  It's his name!  I'm not a racist!" as rocks pummel me.  I also am not sure how to pronounce most of the names of the members of the collective.  I also don't know why some of them are all in capital letters while others aren't.  Do I need to yell out the names in all caps?  What's the protocol?  I couldn't even attempt to ask anyone about it either.  I would do an updated version of what my Mom used to do, saying something like, "Oh, are you listening to The Pink Floyd?  You like him, don't you?".   

The Spider Gang fans seemed to be primarily male high school age kids, the ones that likely get bullied a bit in school by jocks named "Brad" or "Dustin".  They were visibly excited for the show and snaked through the merch tent that was set up on the way in to the venue where I assume none of them had either their ID or additional $2 underage tax ready to go.  Still, I will bet that this crowd was easier to deal with than most hippie shows, a crowed that reliably never knows what the fuck is going on.  The look of the crowd was sort of an updated My Chemical Romance look, a cultivated fashionable outsider vibe that clearly identified you to fellow members of the Tribe.  They came out in force.

I snuck in the back of the room and watched the show for a bit.  I saw a fairly traditional band playing hard rock while some guy with long hair screamed out some lyrics about being disconnected and angry that was like a slower version of Agnostic Front.  There was a guy that looked like a landscaper that sang an emo song with a good hook that connected with the crowd.  It was a rotating cast of characters.  People came and went from the stage.  This is when the really interesting part hit me.  There were two guys on stage doing a live rap to a track, which always sort of sucks live because it's always impossible to understand the words if you don't know the song going in.  Meanwhile there was a guy with a camera that just walked around on stage in between the performers taking pictures.  Another guy with a video camera did the same thing.  They were as prominent on the stage as the performers, so much so that you could successfully argue that they WERE the performers too.  On top of that, about 20-25% of the crowd was holding their phones up making their own videos.  So, a good part of the crowd was there taking video of two guys taking video of two other guys performing to people taking their video to a pre-programmed track so later all parties involved would share it on their own video platforms to all parties present who would then share the video to each other.  It was a perfect circle.  

Andy Warhol would have loved it.  The fans were excited and vocal.  There was great energy.  Everyone in the room was creating content.  They are all artists.  They are also all consumers.  There will be videos of people making videos that are shared via video to get people to come out and then make more videos to share to comment on and allow more video posting.  This was a gala of content creation, the true commodity of youth.  When I looked up some of the artists I couldn't quite grasp what they did.  Things have moved on from simple definitions like "rapper".  Everyone is working across multiple mediums.  Using several aliases, one of the members is a musician, video artist, and game designer.  All of these worlds seem to intersect as his fans will watch him play video games on Twitch,  take highlights to post on other sites, listen to his music via stream, engage with him on his platforms, and all talk shit about each other in a tight community.  This is when it hit me.  This was the same as the punk scene in 1984.  

In the early 80s, fans would come out to see bands in tiny performance spaces no one in The Public knew about.  The music was underground.  One of your friends found out about it, shared it with you, and suddenly you are buying all the records by the artists on SST.  Bands like Husker Du, Minutemen, Black Flag, and Meat Puppets were huge to my friends, and no one else.  I remember seeing fIREHOSE and it was like having Springsteen tickets to a "normal" person.  This was my band, and the people in the crowd, part of a tribe that "got it".  Arguments would rage in fanzines like Maximum Rock and Roll about minutiae of the scene.  There was a community of passionate fans, like minded people that cared.  The details might be different, but this was the same thing.  These were committed performers that gave 110% on stage and were stars to the kids in the room.  Undeniable energy flowed back and forth.  They had created something by themselves and there was a DIY spirit to the entire endeavor.  I ultimately don't know what Spider Gang is, and I don't understand what's really going on there, and I don't think I am supposed to, but I'll tell you this.  I like what they've got going.     

Nurse the Hate: Covid and an MW Exam

 

After dodging it for two years, I finally got covid.  At this point, seemingly everyone has had it.  There is nothing more boring than to hear everyone's covid story, yet we feel compelled to tell each other our individual experience.  It's like talking about a dream you had the previous night.  To you, it was the center of your world.  To everyone else, it's just something to endure until it's their turn to talk again.  I took a film making class while I went to college, and the professor's area of concentration was making these surreal films about dreams he had experienced.  I remember watching a few of these in class thinking "this doesn't mean anything to me".  Thus, I am aware of how dull this is, yet I am still unable to prevent myself from telling you about my covid experience.   

I am vaccinated and boosted, so my thought was that when I got it I would be like most people I know and feel sorta shitty for a couple days and then shake it off like a cold.  Instead I felt sorta shitty for a few days with a nice little fever, and then felt crappy for a week.  I have since snuggled into a few weeks of feeling "eh" with a two-four hour window each day where I feel decidedly crappy.  The real excitement for me has come from my loss of sense of smell and taste, and the elusive "covid fog".

I am supposed to take my Master of Wine Year One assessment next Monday.  This is a very challenging exam in the best of circumstances.  I believe there is a 10% pass rate, but this might be a legend floating around the program, something like Bigfoot, but scarier.  The aim of the exam is for a candidate to demonstrate that he or she is at a level to be able to proceed to the next exam, the "real exam" if you will, the following year.  I have been grinding away studying for about two to three hours a night six or seven days a week for all of 2022.  While you have been watching Netflix, I have been figuring out what the advantages and disadvantages of crossflow filtration systems have over membrane cartridges in final wine bottling preparation.  You want to talk about canopy management modifications and clonal trials made in Burgundy due to climate change?  Of course you don't, but if you did, I'm your guy. 

I have been diligently tasting wines blind for months, dialing in not so much as being able to just identify wines, but be able to differentiate quality levels within classic regions.  Three weeks ago, I could nose a wine and have a pretty good idea if it was premier cru level+ Burgundy or a more modest village wine.  My sense of smell is so muted now that when I smell that same wine I can't be sure of what the primary fruit aromas are on it.  The last week of June I could tell you a wine had "fresh green apple with nutmeg and cinnamon on the nose with a hint of custard suggesting fermentation in oak with battonage" and now that same wine "smells kinda like lemon... or maybe apple?".   It's not ideal.

The real problem though is this covid fog.  I feel like you do when you are hungover a little bit, but not crushingly so.  Maybe you hit it hard on Saturday night, feel sorta dodgy when you wake up and think you can blast some coffee down your throat and feel OK, but it turns out you feel like someone took a wood planer to your skull and shaved off the first two layers of brain.  You just can't put all the pieces together.  I am on five second tape delay, like a wake n' bake college kid in a dorm.  I walk into rooms and forget why.  I can't put together complex ideas when explaining them.  I will forget key words as I am in the middle of sentences.  I was writing a tasting note and couldn't come up with the term "ripe".  "What's that called when fruit is really squishy and sugary?  It's a short word.  It's like when a cherry is really red...  what the fuck is that again?"  In short, I've become Leo.

I remember having an awful cold a few years ago.  In the days before The Plague, it was expected that you would go to work no matter if you were bleeding from your eyes.  Sure, you might get everyone else in the office sick, but they'd all have to suck it up when they were sick too, because godammit, we have to sell more units!  I discovered a combination that would let me get out the door and function, although with decidedly mixed results.  I would take Mucinex, DayQuil and wash it down with a double espresso.  It was basically a cold medicine speedball.  It might have been what killed John Belushi.  However, I could walk around and appear normal despite the world around me being like The Beatles "Yellow Submarine" cartoon.  I couldn't really engage with anything.  I remember saying to Leo, "Man, I feel like you.  I never really know what is going on and it feels like I'm buzzed all the time."  Leo smiled and said, "It's great, isn't it?". 

This is where I am right now, but the downside is I'm not taking cold medicine speedballs.  I'm all buzzed up and confused organically.   I started writing this blog entry two days ago and have had to edit it three times just for it to make some linear sense.  This would have normally taken me about 25 minutes.  I'm really in a quandary here.  I am faced with the decision of having to defer this exam for a year, losing yet one more year to fucking covid, or taking it and flaming out so fabulously that I am excommunicated from the program entirely.  "Hey Roger, did you see this student's paper?  He thought that $300 vintage Champagne was a cheap grocery store prosecco, and in the essay referred to a concrete fermentation vessel as "a thingy".

Fucking A.  This covid shit is really fucking me over.  Again.